1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to the field of displaying generalized graph structures and access patterns, such as World Wide Web sites, actual usage patterns, and predicted usage patterns, so that the important relationships are exposed.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
The World-Wide Web (“web”) is perhaps the most important information access mechanism to be introduced to the general public in the 20th Century. As larger numbers of organizations rely on the Internet to distribute information to potential consumers and investors, they also realize its potential for distributing and organizing large volumes of data for later retrieval by employees and business partners. A company's web site is rapidly becoming one of its most important business investments.
As an information repository, a web site generally receives high amounts of usage. Due to the current trend of such high use, there is an increasing demand to efficiently organize a web site, prior to and after deployment, so that users can easily find the information they are looking for. For example, if it is predicted that users will often be searching for sales literature when they access a site it would be beneficial to provide a link on the initial page to the literature, or display the relevant literature on the initial page, thereby eliminating the need for a user to delve through several web pages before finding the information.
Once the web page has been deployed there is an ongoing need for analysts to be able to determine whether their predicted access patterns resemble actual usage. This information includes how the site is actually accessed, user access patterns, and whether users are finding the information they are searching for. Analysts want to be able to analyze the evolving web site, its use, and compare that data with predicted data.
Because of analysts' increasing desire to predict a user's access patterns, needs and goals, and discover and understand a user's actual access patterns, relationships between web page content and access patterns, and to efficiently structure a web sites' topology, a need exists far a set of visualization tools which aid in the process of web site design, analysis, and comparison of actual and predicted data. Since web sites are dynamically changing over time, analysts need to understand how changes to the topology affect usage and whether the actual usage resembles predicted usage. Although some conventional web site dispIay methods encode usage information in the visualization, conventional methods do not reference usage information in generating the structure to be displayed from the generalized graph structure. Additionally, typical methods do not allow analysts to compare predicted data with actual data. Moreover, conventional systems do not allow visualization of data in a three-dimensional area in such a way that occlusion of data is reduced.